Nate Silver & the “Moneyball” analogy

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I don’t know, I think that you yourself, if you weren't affecting this false modesty right now –

- would concede that people following your meta poll would be closer than people who were trying to follow individual polls.

NATE SILVER: Well, I’ll tell you what I’m less modest about though, I think we have a better way of doing things, and the reason I got into this is because I found the horserace coverage extremely vapid, right, where a lot of it was just kind of recycling quotes from the campaigns and, and talking in clichés but didn't really hold up to scrutiny. And I had seen in baseball, a field I was in before covering politics, how you had kind of the “Moneyball” revolution seeped its way into kind of journalism first and then inside the game.

Politics, is kind of the, the reverse almost, where campaigns themselves are quite data driven but I think the people who cover them are not as much. They’re always more allured by what they think is the, quote, unquote, narrative, what - what I think, frankly, is the – is the spin.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: You’re kinda like the Jonah Hill character –

- of politics.

NATE SILVER: I've gotten that comparison more than the Brad Pitt comparison...

2. Nate Silver on His Hollywood Future and 'Moneyball'-ing Box Office

Nate Silver on His Hollywood Future and 'Moneyball'-ing Box OfficeThe FiveThirtyEight blogger tells THR he's been approached by agents and producers, has already done work for a studio and isn't sure he wants to write a book about the election: "I prefer to go broader."

This story first appeared in the Nov. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

Statistician Nate Silver was called the breakout star of the Nov. 6 election when his New York Times-based FiveThirtyEight blog accurately predicted the voting outcome in all 50 states. Now Silver soon could be called something else: a Hollywood player.

One high-level talent agency source says that Silver, who does not have entertainment representation, is attracting strong interest from the industry. This person believes Silver could try his hand at everything from box-office analysis to a correspondent gig on a television news program, not to mention radio shows and public speaking. Silver, 34, tells THR he has been approached with offers from TV producers, is pondering a follow-up to his best-selling book The Signal and the Noise (which hit No. 2 on Amazon.com post-election) and has been courted by Los Angeles-based talent agencies...